Michael Nascimento Santos's Blog

Why is everyone talking about grid computing? And what are you doing about it?

"Grid computing" - though it was quite an unknown concept till a few years ago, now everyone is talking about it. Some are saying it is everything we were missing, the next big thing. Others, as some java.net bloggers, are simply skeptical and uncertain about its practical use. But the fact is many huge companies, such as Oracle and IBM, are investing a lot of money on that - and that's a good reason to take a closer look at it.

To begin with, what is grid computing? Grid computing is about spliting your work in small pieces - or jobs, as you prefer - and assigning those pieces to different computer on the network. After they have been processed, you get them together and your main task is done. But what is the big advantage of applying grid computing?

Have you ever thought about reducing the time your Ant builds take to run? What if you could use other developers' machines to run it in parallel while they are having coffee or are out in a meeting? Wouldn't that be great? And what if you could perform parts of a specific transaction in some machines available in a cluster instead of loading one box for a minute when the user could get the response in a few seconds? Those are the kind of things that may be accomplished with grid computing in an easier way.

So, what is the Java standard for grid computing? None. Soon, there will be one and then we will have to accept it, whether we agree with the way it will be or not. If you are among the ones who hate EJBs - I don't, just gave my own suggestions previously here -, or that think that JSPs are a big mistake, stop complaining! Get involved. Talk to the ones who are defining the standard. Go to grid forums, talk to the guys at Sun One Grid Engine, move! Download one of the many implementations available, such as Globus or Sun One Grid Engine, use them, share your thoughts about it! Tell the community what you like and what you don't and why.

Grid computing will be very useful to many people in the future, but if it is not useful for you tomorrow, well, maybe that's why you didn't try to shape its future when you had the chance...

Comments

• It's all distributed computing!
  The latest marketing buzzwords "grid" and "utility" computing are attempts to get people thinking about distributed computing again. Most of my application development over the past few years has been in massively, and dynamically collaborative distributed systems. I have posted the core framework here on this site, as a free gift to those who would like to learn more about distributed computing.
  Widespread adoption of distributed computing will enable the next generation of powerful interactive applications and environments.

  Posted by: cajo on November 27, 2003 at 08:49 AM

• It's all distributed computing!
  Sorry, posting sometimes does something funny things to the links, so here is the resource in plaintext:
  https://cajo.dev.java.net/
  and I'll try a link one more time.John

  Posted by: cajo on November 27, 2003 at 08:52 AM

• It's all distributed computing!
  Indeed. As Dan mentioned (the hype around) Apple's XCode distributed build capabilities, I feel obliged to point out that pmake and gnu make have supported distributed builds for, oh, at least 15 years.

  Posted by: johnm on November 27, 2003 at 09:38 AM

• Grid Computing
  I agree with Mr. Santos, the grid computing is a great feature and is comming to help us, mainly to use better the power of the network. Doing this we will have a kind of virtual computer to process our codes. Congratulations for this paper.

  Posted by: rzfrantz on November 29, 2003 at 05:44 AM

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